Six leadership lessons from Product Management
Product management is a great career path. It helps develop a wonderful balance of soft skills and hard skills. It provides opportunities to make decisions which impact large audiences. It breeds strategic and holistic thinking. Through these experiences, it sets you up with amazing leadership skills in your career.
Here are 6 product management skills and what they teach us about leadership. I shared these at the Accenture Women in Digital event last year and thought to post about it here as well. Hope you can find the connections to leadership useful when thinking about growing your career into bigger things.
1. Tell a good story
As a product manager you learn to inspire multiple levels of the organisation. From your team of developers to your executive c-levels, you need to get people excited about what you are building and WHY your strategy is what it needs to be. This practice makes you a great leader because you learn how to communicate your vision in a way that others can relate to. You learn to empathise with your audience and take them on a journey to see into the future. The future can be next week or in a few years time, but you will learn how to help others see what you see.
2. Think small
Product management teaches us to identify opportunities in all ideas, big and small. It is fun to think big and spend months creating a wizz bang feature only to be humbled by your customer’s lack of appreciation because it doesn’t really solve their problem. As a product manager you learn that a small (seemingly boring) incremental change can make a big impact. As a leader you learn to look for big wins in unexpected places rather than be carried away by shiny new things which make you look good but don’t create true customer impact.
3. Break down complexity
Product managers are required to zoom out and think strategically one minute and be deep in the execution detail in the next. This is a great skill to leverage as a leader because it helps you see how day to day tactical activities build up into the big picture. In the context of leading teams it means you become proficient at explaining how individual goals are linked to team goals and how team goals are linked to the company’s goals. The impact of this is motivated individuals and teams who feel engaged in the overall company mission.
4. Experiment more
Experimentation leads to learning and product management is all about that. It teaches a great leadership lesson because we learn to question our own preconceived ideas and approach our beliefs with a healthy dose of skepticism. In this way product management teaches us a great leadership lesson — to be open to change. Experimentation also teaches us to accept that we can fail and to learn from our failures.
5. Trust your intuition
Good product managers develop strong intuition over time because although we like to be data driven, sometimes there isn’t data available and sometimes our intuition over-rides what the data is telling us. Leadership is all about balancing the five senses alongside intuition to figure out what you think is the right direction and product management provides a great grounding for this.
6. Say no to unfair demands on your time
Everyone has a feature idea in every area of the business. The product manager is expected to take it onboard and act on it immediately. If the product manager actually did behave in this way, the product would no longer be for the customer or user. It would be a frankenstein for internal stakeholders. Product people who became good at protecting their customer’s needs against stakeholders are also learning a great leadership lesson. Product management teaches us to be frugal with time, we don’t want to waste our team’s time by committing them to build features for the wrong reasons. We learn to politely say “sorry, your feature idea didn’t make the backlog, it doesn’t fit into our strategy or the customer needs we are trying to solve”. Similarly effective leaders are selective with their commitments and not afraid to be assertive when managing demands on their time or protecting their teams.
Ultimately, leadership lessons are all around us (in professional and private lives) as long as we choose to identify them and add them to our leadership toolkit.
